When I was a kid, Roger Ebert was "the fat one." Gene Siskel was "the skinny, bald one," of course, and they came on TV at various times over the weekend to tell me what was opening at the local movie theater and whether or not it was worth my time to see it (and as I grew up in the Eighties, a lot of the time it seemed that it wasn't worth my time). I say "various times" because, with the way that "Siskel and Ebert" was syndicated to local TV stations in my area, it could come on at any time, or not at all. But when it did come on, for thirty minutes or so, I could witness two grown men arguing over the relative merits of, say, the latest Christian Slater vehicle or a horror movie in which all the teenagers were young and pretty until they were slashed and bloody.
To say that Ebert was a movie critic is like saying Mickey Mantle played outfield; it's accurate but inadequate to reduce either man to such easy description. In his writing and in his vocal position on television until cancer robbed him of that voice, Roger Ebert made it fun to think deeper about movies and life. The man never met a movie that he didn't like, until he did, and then he could pen such a great review of a bad movie that you almost wanted to see it anyway, in case it was really as bad as he said. When "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" came on VH1 once, I was surprised to see his name in the screenwriting credit; it turns out that he knew firsthand what it was like to be part of a bad or "cult" movie. He was unabashed about the films that he loved, penning entire books about "great movies" that I would recommend to any aspiring film enthusiast, much less an aspiring critic. Yes, he was populist in that he brought movie criticism out of the salons of intellectual circles and brought it to the masses. But he did it because of a genuine love and wonderment at the beauty of an art form.
Criticism is a dirty word, because it's generally thought of as a "negative" word; after all, if you're "criticizing" something, it's assumed that you're not saying nice things about it. But the role of criticism in art is more nuanced: what you're doing is not just pointing out whether a movie or book or album or song or painting is good or not, you're identifying what makes it good, or bad, or average. In criticism as it applies to film, nobody was better than Ebert. Pauline Kael may have had more weight in some circles of film enthusiasts, and much of her writing remains witty and incisive. But when I read her essays and reviews, I sometimes felt that she was being unnecessarily contrarian, just for the hell of it. If Ebert didn't like a movie, really didn't like it, you knew it. And those were the reviews I enjoyed reading most of all, because he loved movies so much that when one rankled him or challenged his belief in the beauty of cinema, he would unleash a verbal assault the equivalent of the Allied landings at Normandy.
Of course, when I began to see film as an art form instead of just entertainment, there was a natural inclination to be dismissive of him, to mistake the TV talking head for the man. It happens with any aspiring artist or (in my case) aspiring snob, to look upon the work of your forefathers with disdain because obviously they didn't "get" it. But then I started reading his work, the reviews that went deeper than his quick "thumbs up/down" judgments on TV. There's some good stuff there, especially in his memoir from a couple of years ago. The man was more in tune with the film revolutions happening around him, and he knew a good film even when other people might be slow to recognize it. Reading Ebert makes you wish you could be as smart,funny, opinionated, sarcastic, and all-around good at writing as he was.
When his memoir came along, I read it and was moved. The cancer that would kill him had at this point robbed him of his speaking voice, but he could still speak through his writing. I heartily recommend, if you haven't already, to pick up "Life Itself." Or pick up any edition of his movie guides, or any of the three "Great Movies" books he published (most of the reviews in those books are online, of course, so whatever format works for you). Roger Ebert was a humanitarian, in the sense that he believed in art's ability to inform your existence, to make you more appreciative of what it meant to be alive and attuned to your surroundings. In "The Apartment," Jack Lemmon's doctor neighbor implores him to be a mensch, which is Yiddish for "human being." Roger Ebert was a mensch, and we need more like him in this world.
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